“We are interested in how you became a feminist scholar and how your feminism affects the way you write about and teach literature.”
That question came to me at the end of the 1980s in a letter from Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, who were planning to co-edit an anthology about feminist literary scholarship. The letter was addressed to a number of feminist critics and resulted in an anthology titled Changing Subjects: The Making of Feminist Literary Criticism, published by Routledge in 1993. Greene and Kahn began with the premise that the critics invited to tell their stories belonged to a “generation” that had “come of age” (1) at a particular historical moment – emotionally in the psychic space of the 1950s, professionally in the post-’68 upheaval of the 1970s. The editors were looking for “personal, anecdotal stories” that the authors were asked to “theorize” (their emphasis) “so as to bring out their historical and political dimensions” (2). They wanted stories that said “I” but in a way that added up to a “we” (1). My contribution to the project was an autobiographical essay I called “Decades.” (Shirley Lim also contributed an essay to this volume, and Carolyn Heilbrun wrote the afterword.)
In 1988 Carolyn Heilbrun published Writing a Woman’s Life, arguably her most successful academic book, in which, among other things, she briefly becomes the biographer of Amanda Cross, telling the story of her own creation as a writer of detective fiction. Seventeen years later, the organizers of this conference have adapted Carolyn’s title to a new constellation that book helped create. In 2005 enough feminists have published memoirs that go beyond the autobiographical essays of the late 1980s for today’s event to have been twice as long. So what has changed since that retrospective moment? We have another Bush in the White House and another war in Iraq. Conservatives are spending large amounts of money trying to dismantle Roe v. Wade and curtailing women’s reproductive rights. Is this just déjà vu all over again?
Probably the shortest answer to the “what has changed” question would be Bill Clinton (as in Bill and Monica) and the memoir biz of the 1990s. The success of the memoir in the marketplace generally, along with that of biography, has made the form appealing to feminist critics who in other eras might have written an academic novel. As Vivian Gornick puts it in The Situation and the Story, “Thirty years ago people who thought they had a story to tell sat down to write a novel. Today they sit down to write a memoir. Urgency seems to attach itself these days to the idea of a tale taken directly from life rather than one fashioned by the imagination out of life” (89).
But we have also been invited today to speak as individual feminist memoir writers and rather than impose a universal narrative on the phenomenon – which, as we’ve just heard, has more than one history and a multiplicity of origins – I want now to turn instead to my own attempt to write a memoir, currently titled “Out of Breath” (in homage to the movie Breathless), a memoir I seem to have been trying to write since 1988, around the time Greene and Kahn invited me to join their project – a narrative I’ve been excreting sporadically in tiny pieces. The history of this process is intimately bound up with two words: “French” and “mistake.”
I wrote a paper called “The French Mistake” for a panel that Alice Kaplan organized at MLA in 1988. At the time Alice was working on the book that was to become French Lessons, then titled “Confessions of a Francophile.” In 1988 I was exiting from my former francophilia and took the occasion of the MLA session to expose my obsession with French mistakes – mistakes I had made in speaking. My linguistic history, naturally enough, took me to France: I tell the story of the six years I lived in Paris (the subject of the current memoir) in less than one paragraph. I relate the story of my career in and out of French departments in another two. All the anecdotes I present have to do with making mistakes: in pronunciation, gender, and men.
